A600 with KS37.300 not being kind with new HDD

[jahc]

You need kickstart 37.350 to use a hard drive on an Amiga 600! 37.000 wont do. The "A600HD" came with the 37.350 rom......

you've been wasting your time with this I think. sorry. :/

[cartmanau]

Generale wrote:
So if I understand correctly the drive isn't detected after a cold boot but is after a warm boot?
Could have something to do with the delay time for detection used by the A600 coupled with a drive that is slow at getting its marbles together.

It only appears after a warm boot after being played with in HDToolBox, every boot after that it isnt there. Go figure.

[cartmanau]

Argus wrote:
@Doobrey

I have a 540mb 2.5" drive from an IBM Thinkpad (DHAA-2540) that just won't work at all with 2.1 of an A600 nor with 3.0 of an A1200.  It will appear under HDToolbox and I can get it to set up partitions.  But then, upon warm reboot, no familiar icons for the partitions.  If I click on the HDSetup program, the icons for the partitions will suddenly appear.  I can then format these and install Workbench on the bootable system partition but after warm reboot nothing again.  Very frustrating indeed.  I've thought about cutting the first wire of the ide cable but never did because the cable cost more ($5.00) than the drive (free).

This is pretty much the exact same problem as I am having.

I was going to grab a 2.5" drive from work today (just to try a different one) but unfortunately I couldnt find one. Will have to ask the boss to find one for me  :-D

@jahc
Actually 37.300 is the first KS to support IDE HDDs in the A600. It is limited to drives of less than 40 MB but the support is there. If there was no support in Kickstart for HDDs then not even HDToolBox could find it as there would be no scsi.device

[Piru]

@jahc

You need kickstart 37.350 to use a hard drive on an Amiga 600! 37.000 wont do. The "A600HD" came with the 37.350 rom......

you've been wasting your time with this I think. sorry. :/

Funny how the HDD appears with the HDToolBox then. It must be using some magic IR IDE link there...

Seriously:

37.299 - no IDE or PCMCIA support
37.300 - PCMCIA, HDD upto 40 MB (*)
37.350 - PCMCIA, HDD any size

(*) There are some reports of success of even bigger HDD with 37.300, however. YMMV.

[cartmanau]

Alright, seems the problem is sorted now.

I managed to get my boss to drop me around a nice 200 MB drive last night. Popped that in and it worked fine. THinking then it is obviously a drive problem, I pulled pin 1 off the mobo, most boots the 40MB is there, but if not (when the insert disk screen comes up) I just reset and off it goes.

Thanks for all the help guys

[orange]

'mobo' is on HDD, not A600, right?

[cartmanau]

orange wrote:
'mobo' is on HDD, not A600, right?

Mobo - motherboard. I did it dodgy - I just snapped pin 1 off the board of the A600

[Jope]

It might have been a better idea to carefully open either end of the 44pin flat cable and peel out the red cable.

But end result is the same in both cases - the reset signal doesn't get to the drive and it is immediately ready for action even after keyboard resets.

IDE drives very seldom hang in a way that they stop responding to commands, so you will probably never miss that reset signal.

[Brian]

@Piru
My 37.300 works fine with a 1Gb HD so I dunno about the 40Mb barrier of the 37.300 kickstart, for me it's always been a fairytale

@cartmanau
I've had the exact same scenario with HD's in the A600 and A1200 as you have. The reason is simply that the HD is too slow for the IDE controller and HDToolbox with "pull" the IDE line again. (Pritty sure the kickstart 3.0 holds the IDE line for just a tad longer than the 2.0 and 3.1 holds even longer and that can be why the HD work on your A1200 but not on the A600.)

What I did to correct the problem was simply to cut pin 1 on the IDE cable (the marked one). This will work so the HD doesn't get a resetsignal and thus be ready after a warmreset. This can then be used in a combination with a "reset holding curcuit" that "holds" reset for sec or two... just enough for the HD to spin up and get ready.

[Jope]

The _RESET signal is pulsed only for a brief moment, but the kickstart versions differ in the amount of time they sit around waiting for the drive.

KS3.1 waits up to 30 sec before it deems that there is no physical drive answering to the unit it's trying to query.